The Hidden Caribbean

Ten islands where they'll never find you

Jan 29, 2007

ROATÃN, HONDURAS The people of RoatÃ¡n would like to rename it the Miracle Island, and for good reason. Because RoatÃ¡n is attached to another place, Honduras, it has been accepted as fact that it no longer exists. In 1998, when Hurricane Mitch wiped the mainland clean like an enormous hand, killing thousands and turning its economy on end, the storm hovered just thirty-six miles off RoatÃ¡n before missing the island. But in the shadow of Honduras's ruin, the island that boasts one of the largest and best-preserved reefs in the world has witnessed its once-booming tourism industry drain into the sea. Truth is, the storm actually helped the island. It scrubbed the algae off the reefs and cooled the waters, which has attracted bigger fish. The diving rivals neighboring Belize, and its resorts are some of the most affordable in Central America. So spread the news. The Miracle Island didn't make a comeback, it was always there. TACA Airlines (800-535-8780) flies directly to RoatÃ¡n from Houston (Saturdays only) and Miami (Sundays only). Recommended: Bay Island Beach Resort (800-476-2826). --Bryan Mealer

BIMINI, BAHAMAS The tiny island cluster fifty miles off the coast of Florida is the source of some of the Caribbean's tallest tales. It's believed that a road leading to the lost city of Atlantis is buried beneath fifteen feet of water off its coast, and after psychic Edgar Cayce predicted the city's discovery in the exact year the road was found, Bimini became a mecca for people who believe those kinds of stories. And then there are the sand dunes in the mangroves in the shapes of a shark and a sea horse. And Ponce de LeÃ³n's Fountain of Youth was said to bubble from a pile of rocks on a southern island. But if you want a real pistol of a story, ask around for Piccolo Pete. Pete's been there all his ninety years, at one time was possibly the best fisherman in the Bahamas, and for years drove around this son of a bitch writer named Hemingway, telling him all his stories. You know The Old Man and the Sea? Good one, ain't it? Hell, that was his story, goddammit, and no Hemingway ever sent him a dime. And that goes for most of the others he wrote, too. But if it's the road to Atlantis you must see, it's there, all right. Just get in a plane and you can see it: two straight rows of stone that shoot off the northern tip like a buried runway. Or you can just ask Pete. "Oh, yeah, that," he says. "Used to break my hooks on it all the time." Chalk's International (800-424-2557) flies its legendary seaplanes daily to Bimini from Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Paradise Island. --B. M.

THE EXUMAS, BAHAMAS Along the eastern skirt of the Great Bahama Bank, 365 tiny scattered cays make up the Exumas. Along the southern edge of the island of Little Exuma, near a town called the Ferry, there in an eighteen-foot dinghy stands a tiny old woman, legs planted on either side of the boat, struggling with a rope that appears to be attached to the very drain plug of the sea. For half an hour, she holds on, curses flying, arms jerking, her hands white-knuckled around the line that holds a creature twice the size of her. As you get nearer, you see that on the other end is a giant shark, jaws locked around a taut section of industrial chain, clearly pissed off. When she does ask for help, it's to take the line while she fetches her bang stick, her shark killer, which she carries over her shoulder like an ax. She places the fat end of the stick against the head of the snapping beast, the stick lets out a kicking thud, and the shark and the chain twitch until limp in the water. Later, Gloria Patience, the Great Shark Lady of the Exumas, sends you home with a most beautiful necklace laced with shark parts and English pearls, which she makes in the Happy Room of her home, which she calls Tara. Gloria recommends visiting in April, during the Out-Island Regatta, which she won three years ago with a crew of topless girls. Gloria Patience: 242-345-5055; American Eagle (800-433-7300) flies daily into Exuma from Miami; Bahamasair (800-222-4262) flies from Fort Lauderdale, Orlando, and Miami to Georgetown via Nassau. --B. M.

TREASURE BEACH, JAMAICA First check into Jake's--the technicolor bungalow colony that put Treasure Beach on the map--then find Ted, he of the thick trunk, the surplus charisma, and the ass crack that never quite stays hidden below the waistband of his baggy shorts. He might fetch you at Jake's or ask you to meet him about a quarter mile down the beach, where he keeps his boat, Di Evil Tings. After Ted cranks up the outboard, the boat rockets westerly along the island's arid south coast, pitching and rolling in the swollen sea. Hang a right up the Black River, past the Black River Hotel and into the jungle, where the river becomes a '50s pinup girl, soft and approachable. After an hour slaloming through the lily pads, shredding the surface with the long, sharp hull of Di Evil Tings, you arrive at Rudy's place--a squat dock, a dirt-floor shack, and a fridge full of beer. Rudy's a quiet guy with a slow smile. He leans over a twig fire in the dirt and tends to a banged-up pot sizzling with a few small fish, species unknown, plus some tomatoes, peppers, and onions. With the sun on his face, he plates the fish with some rice and hands you a plastic fork. Peel away the skin and extract the sweet white meat. Then pour beer over the spices in your mouth, smile at Rudy and Ted, and spit the bones into the deep, dewy grass. Jake's: 876-965-3000; islandoutpost.com. --Brendan Vaughan

LITTLE CORN ISLAND,

NICARAGUA Carving out your own piece of paradise isn't easy. In fact, it can damn near kill you. It was the early '90s, and Grant Peeples was living in Miami and growing sick of the city and its lines and traffic and trying to run a business in a time when business was bad. So he pulled out a map and remembered Little Corn Island, a tiny, lost-looking speck of land fifty miles off Nicaragua that he'd once seen from a plane. He went, fell in love, and found a plot of beach for sale. But the owner of the land was hard to find, and after a year of combing the mainland, asking fishermen and Indians and children where she was, he finally found her in Miami, two blocks from where he had lived. He sold his business and his house, hauled a stack of fresh lumber to the beach on Little Corn Island, and spent the next ten days half dead from malaria, sweating buckets and warding off the voices that told him this was all a bad idea. Now Grant and his wife, Kathy, own Casa Iguana, six large cabins on a mile-wide island with no cars, no phones, and a couple hundred cordial lobster fishermen. Good fishing is guaranteed, and the snorkeling is world-class. Casa Iguana: Contact U. S. representatives Larry Knutson and Kim Blocher at 717-677-0947 or casaiguana.net. --B. M.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI In the late '70s, Richard Morse was living out a little American dream of sorts: He graduated from Princeton and moved to New York City and fronted a punk band named Groceries, thrashed CBGBs, and opened shows for new-wave hair bands. And after the band fizzled, he fell in with Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat and shared brushes for a while with Francesco Clemente. This was in New York, where things like that happen sometimes. Morse wasn't going to be a painter, though, so he moved to Haiti to "study rhythms," and when he found himself in a taxi in Port-au-Prince, handing a voodoo priest twenty bucks to cast a little juju so he could take over Haiti's only famous hotel, his dream suddenly veered left, sped up, jackknifed--he isn't sure which. All that's certain is the hotel is his now. For the past fourteen years, Morse, forty-three, has run the Hotel Oloffson, the macabre "Trianon" in Graham Greene's The Comedians and home in dysfunctional times to a host of marines and reporters and danger seekers. And in better times, such as now, when the ragtag streets of Port-au-Prince flood with an energy and grace Haiti is famous for under all that stigma, Morse prefers you, the tourist. Every Thursday night at the Oloffson, his voodoo band, RAM, throws the biggest party in town and plays until morning, when people have to be asked to stop dancing on the tables and Morse walks the empty grounds, trying to figure out this dream he's been given. Hotel Oloffson: 011-509-223-4000. --B. M.

MONA ISLAND, PUERTO RICO The Mona Passage, eighty miles of perilous sea between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, represents for many Dominicans the forty days in the wilderness they must pass through before they reach San Juan and continue an even longer journey to the States. But exactly halfway across this stretch of sharks and bad mojo lies Mona Island, one of the Caribbean's most hidden dive sanctuaries and national parks. The island is encrusted with one of the sea's most unspoiled reefs, plus a four-thousand-ton barge that ran aground on its edge. And aside from park rangers, some endangered sea turtles, and a few rare, dog-sized iguanas that are found only on the island, Mona is yours for the taking. You've never seen stars like this at night, and from now until January, stately humpback whales pass within yards of shore. Captain Ramon PeÃ±a (787-255-2031) offers package trips to the island; $1,150 for a group of six. Ask for Elba Padilla. --B. M.

CARRIACOU, GRENADINES Up until the 1950s, anyone in Carriacou could tell you that the mermaids would visit in May. On this sleepy island of fishermen and boatbuilders seventeen miles north of Grenada, villagers would place food offerings on the beach for these "goddesses of the sea," who rode in on a giant white wave. They'd sun themselves on the rocks beyond the island's northern tip and return to the sea on a wave the color of blood, leaving the air heavy with the smell of rain. When he was nine years old, Canute Caliste was walking home along the lagoon road in Harvey Vale when he saw his first mermaid. She was sitting on the bridge near the jetty, combing her long black hair. When Caliste approached her, she fled, but she returned to him that night and promised a gift if he set aside his fear. She placed a comb with a single strand of her hair in his pocket and a Bible on his chest. When he awoke, he realized that the gift was painting, and now Caliste's portraits of mermaids and island life hang in galleries across the world. Tourists now follow hand-painted signs to his studio in L'Esterre, and on December 15 the island celebrates his work as part of the Parang cultural festival. For tours of Caliste's studio, contact Clemencia Alexander at the Carriacou Museum, 473-443-8288. --B. M.

BEQUIA, GRENADINES In Port Elizabeth, a hub of Bequian boatbuilders and drifting yachties, Orton King launched his small wooden boat off the same beach for thirty years. He'd sail out to where the seafloor vanishes into black, strap a spear to his back, and sink sixty feet down to where the bonefish swam deep. But when money was tight, Orton took work on fishing boats that trolled the Grenadines. One afternoon, a captain of one of these ships ignored a storm warning and steered his crew straight into a funnel. Everyone died but Orton. For two days, he drifted on a piece of splintered board and survived on rainwater and tiny fish that huddled against his chest for shade. When he was finally rescued, it wasn't him the passing ship saw but the dolphins nudging him toward land. Now Orton has a survival story that Bequia loves to hear. In fact, he has two. Orton's job now is saving the lives of the Grenadines' near-extinct hawksbill turtles, whose mothers abandon them on the beaches to hatch amid hungry mobs of birds and crabs. Typically, only one turtle in a thousand survives the march into the surf. Orton has already saved four hundred on Bequia, where he's a hero, and that's why the people now call him Brother King. Contact the Old-Hegg Sanctuary, 784-458-3596. Donations accepted for tours. --B. M.

BONAIRE Stephan smoked too much and drank too much, and the sun had sculpted odd, fleshy blotches on his face. Any of those things could kill him, but so what? Dying in the glass-clear waters of Bonaire was better than wasting away in the South African pharmacy where Stephan used to make a dreary living. "I got tired of sick people and crying babies," he told me one brilliant afternoon. So he bought a boat and, with his wife, Renee, sailed to South America, then north into the Caribbean. They ran out of money in Bonaire, the pristine sibling of the Dutch Antilles. He paid the bills by ferrying tourists around the leeward coast on a trimaran named the Woodwind. "Now my customers are happy," he said. "And that makes me happy."

The last time I saw Stephan, he was dying of cancer. "I smoke, and my lungs, they're fine," he growled. "I drink, and my liver is fine. It's my fucking pancreas. If I'd known, I would've smoked more and drank more." Which, for that afternoon, he did. And I lay in the water, letting a trunkfish nibble on my fingers, wishing I could smoke and drink and die right here, above a stand of tube coral, watching the lazy, sherbet swirls of parrot fish. Contact Renee at the Woodwind, 011-59-99-560-7055. --Sean Flynn

And a Bottle of Rum For nearly a decade, Culebra-based writer Edward Hamilton has sailed the Caribbean isles in search of the perfect rum. In order to propagate his findings and help raise awareness of the spirit he considers overlooked, Hamilton created the Ministry of Rum, a one-man campaign that has spawned an impressive Web site, two published guides, and a forthcoming documentary. The Ministry has also given him an excuse to stay aboard his boat and drink. Although it's impossible to choose one Caribbean rum over the rest, he offers here his favorites.

Bolans Best Matured Rum, Antigua

Bushy, the head postmaster with a set of fat muttonchops and a toothy grin, mixes this concoction using a "little magic" in the back of Bolans Post Office, near Jolly Harbor.

A. H. Riise 6--12 Year Old, St. Thomas

Distilled in St. Croix, blended by the A. H. Riise company, and sold in a classic etched bottle exclusively in Riise's duty-free store.

El Dorado Special Reserve, Guyana

With its deep-brown coloring and smoky flavor, this rum begs for a splash of water and a cigar. In order to find its distillery, Hamilton sailed way up the Demerara River, flanked by armed soldiers to ward off pirates.

Rhum Bologne, Guadeloupe

A white rhum agricole made from sugarcane juice rather than the traditional molasses. Hamilton suggests starting the day with a Bologne 'ti punch, already a staple drink in France and soon to be America's next mojito.

Rhum Vieux De Paz Reserve

Special, Martinique

When Hamilton met Andre De Paz, the seventy-two-year-old chain-smoking patriarch of the De Paz distillery, the old man interrupted their meeting to drive up the mountain and shoot a beef cow. Later, the two sat around sharing a bottle of his Reserve Special, which rivals the finest cognacs of France.

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